


Self Care

by Opacifica



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dirk Is There, Extremely Consensual Sex, Extremely Thoroughly Discussed Selfcest, F/F, Hand Jobs, Mild Breathplay, Monologuing As Foreplay, Monologuing As Sex Act, Partially Clothed Sex, Porn With Metanarrative Implications, Porn With Plot, Porn With Psychoanalysis, Recreational Drug Use, Selfcest, The Homestuck Epilogues, Unfortunately I Cannot And Will Not Stop, Verse Rose Lalonde, Would You Fuck Your Clone Because Rose Lalonde Would, for science, no not like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 21:35:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20607704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: “So we answer the time-honored question by taking a third option,” she says, with a ghost of a smile. “When confronted by our clone, we neither fight nor fuck. We monologue.”“Dialogue,” you parry. “For all we’re being mindful of our prefixes.”Rose attempts a thought experiment. Some Strilondes are gentler with their splinter-selves than others. Spoiler alert: they fuck.





	1. The Marxist Dialectic

You wake up. Or perhaps you fall asleep. Regardless, and more neutrally as to the metanarrative or metacognitive circumstances, you become conscious of being Rose Lalonde, as you are confident that you have many times in the last twenty-two years.

This would be a fairly mundane occurrence, in fact, were you not face-to-face with someone who is, for all intents and purposes, also you.

She looks up in near-perfect synchrony with your own movement.

“So,” you say, in unison so precise with your duplicate that you nearly miss the fact that she is speaking simultaneously with you. “Temporal misalignment, retroactive duplication, or ecto-clone?”

The eeriness of your voices in tandem is not lost on you, or seemingly on her. You frown symmetrically, then raise a hand in a sort of experiment. She does exactly the same, though not as a mirror; as though an achiral molecule, your dominant right hand and hers, perfectly superimposable. Fascinating.

“This may be something else -” you both say, and then halt in place.

Perfectly materially identical in all respects, down to the synapse. Each of your responses informed by identical circumstances and environmental factors. Roses all the way down. You feel the corner of your mouth tighten slightly as you smile at your own joke, and see her do the same.

“We’re going to need to diverge,” she says, at the same instant that you come to the same conclusion and make the pronouncement identically.

The overlap of it all is making your head spin just slightly.

A coin flip, then. No, you’ll call the same side, and you don’t have a coin. Drawing straws, or…

You reach up and pluck two strands of hair from your head, at the same time that she does the same. She smiles knowingly at you, and you reciprocate in kind without so much as a beat passing between the gestures.

Reaching out again, you put your hands together, discarding one of your strands, one of hers, as you do.

“Longest speaks first,” you agree in unison.

You draw the slightly longer hair. At least in this matter, there is some slight discrepancy. You had been prepared to draw identical lengths, somehow, but this outcome merely establishes that rather than being trapped in some kind of mechanism of perfect replication, it is far more likely that the two of you are simply true-identical clones, capable of executing the same action and drawing different lengths of hair, subject to the same slight biological variability of any two organisms.

Of course, now, you’ve resumed smiling slightly, and her brow is just barely furrowed.

“Well, go on then,” she says, with a hint of a sigh, which is certainly what you would say in her place.

Faced with the burden of beginning this dialogue, however, you take a few moments to consider your situation and your circumstances. You are nowhere that you recognize, a bare room with minimal fixtures and no apparent entries or exits. The carpet is beige, the walls slightly-off-beige, the light in the space furnished by a single fixture overhead.

“Please indicate nonverbally if you agree or disagree with any statement that I make,” you begin, deciding that efficiency will be paramount in making this a mutually tolerable conversation, knowing how quickly your tendency to _weigh in_ can wear just as much on you as on a conversational partner.

She inclines her forehead slightly, as you would, to demonstrate that she recognizes the rationale behind the suggestion and can execute it capably.

“Alright. I believe that we are the same person, to perhaps a sub-molecular level, or we _were_ prior to introducing an element of entropy to the proceedings.”

You pause; she nods.

“Based on this, I suspect that reflecting on the conditions that led us here will serve no particularly elucidatory function. We are here for identical reasons, based on identical paths, as we are, for all intents and purposes, identical. This is an assumption we can make with great reliability, unless one of us is willfully deceiving the other, which never ought to be ruled out.”

She nods again.

“That said, the chances of a deliberate act of deception are strikingly low, in part because few entities of which we are aware posess the power or the impetus to do so, and still fewer would be capable of maintaining the farce for longer than the few seconds it would take to disorient us, _David Elizabeth Strider._”

Both of you pause and wait.

“Well, it was worth a try,” she sighs.

“Certainly,” you agree, almost disappointed when Dave does not immediately reveal himself in some way the architect of your current position.

Wouldn’t that make sense? A millisecond’s difference, two time-clones, some accompanying machinations, though it wouldn’t precisely fit his modus operandi, as Dave tends to regard time travel as a tool with such gravity.

“If I may?” she begins, and you nod politely, prepared to play by your own rules. “I suspect that we are the culpable entity.”

You were roughly to that point yourself, but her voicing it crystallizes the potentiality. You have, when you think about it, been speaking quite a bit with Dirk lately about certain abstract notions of reality-generation and Skaia’s narrative reproductive function as applied to the nature of your own lives on Earth-C. It has piqued your interest greatly. While you can’t quite recall the last action you may or may not have taken prior to gaining what you presently understand to be consciousness, if this is not some prank facilitated by John or Dave, the most likely culprit is yourself.

Or, more accurately, your alpha self, a term that Dirk has taken to using that you find quite descriptive in these sorts of situations. Unlike much of your family, you have _fairly_ little experience with division of self, and it’s reassuring to know that the terminology that has been useful to them can find a similar role in your present dilemma.

Realizing that she is waiting for you to nod, you do so, agreeably.

“It is my speculation, and correct me, please, if this is not the conclusion at which you have arrived, that we may be a thought experiment made canon.”

“Would this be _canon_, though?” you reply, frowning. “To what function, exactly, are we essential? What is the nature of our relevance? We can, of course, agree that what is happening is true, from our shared perspective, based on observational inquiry, and yet, much of our situation defies truthfulness. The lack of doors permitting entry to this space, for instance, disallows internally consistent explanation. We are here, and yet we cannot reasonably be here. Our presence in this dimension, if we can call it that, cannot be extrapolated from the constituent guidelines of spatio-temporal reality.”

“Well explained,” she acknowledges, and you smile slightly. “I revise my theory, in light of this evidence, to suggest that we have attained a non-zero property of _existence_ rather than canonacity, which was already quite a leap.”

“I find myself inclined to agree with you. Our ‘being’ attribute rather than the properties attendant to truth or any of the other tenets of canon.”

“‘Being’ is a good word for it.”

“Thank you.”

“Simply an observation.”

You find it perilously easy to lose track of who is speaking. She sounds exactly like you, because despite your forced-fork ploy, she is still you. As you watch her pause to think, you wonder if she is facing the same confusion.

“A thought experiment, then,” you say.

“Yes. It would make a great deal of sense. There’s little to be gained from such a setup otherwise, unless, of course, a practical joke. We know ourselves if we know nothing else. Insight, from this assembly of circumstances, can exclusively be gleaned on the subject of Rose-ness, or being-Rose in some way.”

She’s correct - by your standards, of course, which are certainly limited in scope. It is difficult to proceed without acknowledging that, between the two of you, this room will almost certainly become an echo chamber of being-Rose. You may well intensify each others’ properties beyond verisimilitude. A single Rose in isolation as opposed to two Roses in tandem represents an inherent departure from the material reality of one-Rose. Humans, including yourself, are eusocial creatures, highly subject to the influence of other humans in perceived proximity. While you are likely continuing down a path more-or-less hand-in-hand, with the influence of entropic path-splitting codified in the form of the single blonde hair still held between your thumb and forefinger, with every moment that passes here, you grow more like each other and less like the alpha Rose.

Or do you bring her with you on your explorations?

You wonder if that could be the point of the experiment.

It doesn’t seem like a question that you would invest this much effort in answering, particularly given that your affinity for light typically lends itself to less observational and more intuitive examinations of these sorts of problems.

“I assume that we have both been considering the potential utility of such a thought experiment in examining selfhood?” the other Rose says, and you nod idly, still very much doing exactly that. “With perhaps the same attendent qualms as to the likelihood of that specific explanation.”

“Yes,” you agree. “Though I propose we cease this line of inquiry, or at least ease back on the throttle. We have a tendency to analyze the horse to death in lieu of beating it when given the opportunity.”

She nods acknowledgement.

“I further propose that this is, instead, the manifestation of a far more simple experiment,” you say, gaining certainty as you hear yourself say it aloud, another fantastic property of human eusociality, that one can, in essence, be influenced by one’s own thoughts and beliefs, once they are made a matter of extrinsic record to which one can refer for the purposes of decision-making. “One nearly as old as thought experiments themselves.”

“Intriguing,” she says. “I would be misrepresenting myself if I claimed that I hadn’t. Well. Considered it.”

“Indeed.”

“So, what now? It’s almost pointless to attempt a deliberative dialogue, isn’t it, when we inevitably desire an identical outcome. Based on your possession of the long straw, and with no preference of my own to exhibit beyond that at which you arrive, I defer to you. Shall we fight, or fuck?”

“The question, as it does with alarming frequency, becomes one concerning the ethics of clonefucking, or selfcest, as it were,” you admit. “I have no particular desire to fight you, of course. I can’t say I have anything in particular against myself as I currently am. I am generally satisfied with the quality of my decision-making, and this exchange in particular has been nothing but pleasant. Do you disagree?”

You’ve definitely had this conversation, lately. The trouble is that there are as many suspects in this matter as there were if the entire setup was an extended practical joke, if not more. Did you fall asleep arguing over the matter with Kanaya? It doesn’t seem outside of the realm of possibility.

“I’m inclined to agree. There is little reason for us to be at odds.”

“The trouble I’ve always had with these sorts of - or, _we’ve_ had, my apologies - is that we similarly lack a motive to… well.”

“To fuck,” she supplies matter-of-factly, and you bite back a laugh. “Do we really? Or is that simply an virtuous posture we take on when subjected to external observation?”

“To describe opposition to clonefucking as virtuous, one must consider some aspect of clonefucking to be outside of the realm of virtue. I don’t believe that I have any such compunctions, particularly when certain underlying standards have been met. I imagine that you share these standards; more or less that any union adhere to all general auspices of informed consent, including one between clones.”

“Wouldn’t sexual relations between near-perfect clones represent the apex of informed consent?”

“Not necessarily, though I imagine that you share these potential misgivings as well. I misread my own intentions, in hindsight, with alarming frequency. Between two distinct individuals, there is the expectation of some level of disfluent translation between intention and communication. Thus, in hetero-identity relations, the burden of each partner to inquire and actively both establish and voice consent is far more explicit.”

“Hetero-identity. _Excellent_ term.”

“Admittedly, I can’t conceive of many other situations in which it would be useful, and the prefix is somewhat misleading.”

“So we answer the time-honored question by taking a third option,” she says, with a ghost of a smile. “When confronted by our clone, we neither fight nor fuck. We monologue.”

“Dialogue,” you parry. “For all we’re being mindful of our prefixes.”

She hums softly in agreement, watching your face carefully. It’s fascinating how quickly you’ve ceased to be entirely in synch.

“Perhaps we aren’t perfectly alike in some respect,” she says, “because I’ve always wondered, somewhat. Less, I think, in the hubristic sense, more in terms of pure curiosity. How _am_ I? We’ve been with Kanaya for such a long time, and have no experience at all with someone whose anatomy is like our own; this is hardly an injunction against her in any respect. Merely a question to mull over, in light of the opportunity at hand.”

A fraction of a tooth slips into her smile.

“Incredible,” you say. “Is it merely the probabilistically random selection of one straw over another that is ultimately allowing you to speak frankly on that subject?”

“Can you not do the same?”

You laugh, almost incredulously. Just once.

“Clearly not, or I imagine that I would have!”

“Well, perhaps you could give it a try now that I’ve broken the ground. I would have suspected the reverse of this state of affairs. She who speaks first, speaks most frankly.”

“Thus is the burden of steering, I suppose,” you sigh. “When one adopts even the meanest mantle of control, one must be cautious with it.”

“Ah, then you’ve decided to top.”

“You’ve clearly made _your_ decision about preferred positioning.”

“Does it ease your potential ethical objections, to think of us textually as separate entities?” she asks, stepping slightly closer to you.

“I never formally professed to ethical objections. This will simply have to proceed by a prescribed set of communicative standards. I trust you to be forthright, recognizing my own capacity to be forthright in your… role. That said, unconventionally for more… normie sex, if you will, I’ll remind us both that we may employ our safeword if necessary.”

“Am I really like this when I top?” she laughs.

“Only when you top your own double,” you say, a little shortly.

You feel a prickle of anxiety, wondering if you’ve ever discussed precisely this scenario with Kanaya before. You can’t postulate a set of circumstances in which she would be anything other than intrigued by, well, the situation presently unfolding, though you’ve always worried that this sort of laissez-faire attitude on her part may have something to do with not wanting to be seen as the ‘ball and chain’. At the same time, you recognize that this isn’t an entirely fair analysis based on her upbringing and Alternian cultural context. That this particular kind of extracurricular fucking represents little categorical threat to a matespritship.

Couldn’t it really be considered more a form of masturbation? That is certainly one of the most prevalent entry-level interpretations of clonefucking.

That settles your nerves slightly.

This whole thing would be more of a surprise if a certain level of duality were not a tendency of yours of which you are perfectly aware. You shift easily between roles. It makes perfect sense that your alternate, adopting your traditional means of gently suggesting to Kanaya that you’re inclined to be fucked into the mattress, is more easily able to take on the part.

Frankly, it’s the path of least resistance. It’s a well-honed and much-practiced skill. And you enjoy getting utterly wrecked, by your wife and by your wife alone, you thought, though apparently you’re open-minded enough to solicit the same treatment from yourself.

You say ‘apparently’, here, as though feigning ignorance will somehow prove exculpatory. As though there is some sin in action to forgive, or as though you’re either less or more than her for the manner in which you’ve wound up orienting yourself in this tableau. Which one, Rose?

“Truly, there’s no need to wind yourself up so much,” she says, cupping your cheek with a hand that feels both impossibly familiar and entirely foreign, detached from your body, improperly situated. “The only entity sitting in judgement of your conduct is your self.”

“That may be the problem,” you say. “I care… a great deal, what I think of myself. You must know as well as I do that the outcome of this interlude… matters to me. You were the one who suggested that the events of this experiment would be canon as a first foray at explaining our circumstances. I fear that you might be correct, and that the truth of our actions will have implications for our alpha self.”

“If the truth of us has drastically negative consequences for any version of our self, I think we may have more significant problems than who tops whom.”

“Well, precisely.”

“Look. Take a moment to examine the situation from a broader perspective. We can only be who and what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. Our actions reveal us just as readily as the masks we choose. It was a mistake to dismiss this situation for its potential as a dialectic. That’s what it is. Conflict between opposing elements of the self, resolved through synthesis. I doubt it was Marx’s intention for that confrontation of thesis and antithesis to be, explicitly, two of one’s manifestations of self fucking each other, but I ought not to speak for him. Does that make sense to you? The truth exists, and whether through deliberate and controlled examination or otherwise, it will eventually be revealed. Obfuscation of the truth serves no one.”

“What an impassioned case for clone-fuckery.”

“Thank you, I do try. Though, to be fair, I’m certain that yours in rebuttal would be quite as eloquent and possibly even more persuasive. If I were not going to intervene to prevent you from making it.”

“I beg your pardon?” you say, as she whispers ‘safeword!’ and leans in to kiss you.

She doesn’t quite meet with the center of your lips at first, pressing hers to the corner of your mouth gently and working her way in with a second kiss, careful and exploratory. You’ve never kissed anyone of precisely your height before. The negotiation of noses and such takes a moment, and you’re acutely aware of every square centimeter of your skin, of her skin, of her lips on yours. She smells pleasantly of herbal soap. You suppose that you probably do as well, but are too accustomed to the scent to notice it until compounded by another presence.

You draw away for a second, take a breath, and choose, consciously, to be this Rose. This situation is not merely happening _to_ you. Yes, a beautiful woman is kissing you. That’s an objective assessment of the situation, not mere vanity. And this is a stellar opportunity in all respects. You are truly only beholden to yourself, and through this designation, to her. And you are kissing her back, and she is yielding to the act, to you.

Softly, at first. You know exactly the way she likes to be kissed. It’s the work of a moment to situate yourself, to rest your hand against the small of her back, to twine the other in her hair, not to pull, but to suggest that you could. She sighs against your lips, drapes her arms around your shoulders, traces her fingertips against the side of your neck, just the slightest edge of short-trimmed nails scraping against your skin.

“Not so intolerable as you expected, is it?” she murmurs, and you wonder which of you she is speaking to.

Most likely both.

You draw her closer and kiss her again, harder, moving your hand up her back to press her against you, wanting to feel your hearts beat in eerily perfect time. She shivers in your arms. You know she can feel it, too, how you are as alike as two beings can be, how you know each other perfectly.

Time slows for you as you run your fingers through her hair, suck lightly on her lower lip until she parts her mouth for you, sighs again, and you kiss her in earnest, still deliberate and neat, though her tongue flicks against yours and you recognize the encouraging noises she is making as your own wordless pleas to _get on with it already_.

It’s a sort of difficulty of its own, trusting someone the way that she is currently trusting you. In the obvious ways, voluntarily allowing you to move her body the way that you prefer, but also in the sense that she - you - well, you always worry, in the moment, that you seem ridiculous, laughable in some way, excessively artificial or insufficiently guarded. You worry about that most of the time, though, whether or not you’re doing yourself and the people you care about credit with your actions. It’s simply a thousand times more vulnerable in this context. Even with only your own heavy-lidded purple eyes gazing back at you when you pause to look at her.

“You are doing,” you say, pressing your mouth to the seam where her jaw meets her neck, “an excellent job of being Rose.”

“I could say the same to you,” she laughs, a sound that lapses into a sharp intake of breath as you move to her throat, thumbing down the contours of her trachea and following the gesture with a line of soft open-mouthed kisses. “Though at some point it becomes - ahhh - self-congratulatory, does it not?”

“I most certainly hope it does,” you say. “I think we owe ourselves more in the way of congratulations than we typically allocate for that purpose.”

“You can just say that we have a massive and devastatingly repressed praise kink. We both know it’s true. The credit is yours for having acted on it first, though.”

“We’ll have to file that item of consideration away for more explicit analysis once we’ve taken more pressing matters off the agenda,” you tell her.

“Mm, but we’ve always been so psychoanalytical in our foreplay. Tell me, Rose, was it the hollow affirmation we received from our mother in adolescence? Our Freudian desperation for the validating father figure absent from our childhoods? Twisted psychosexual rivalry tempered by codependency with our own brother? Who do we _really_ want to tell us we’re good? Try it again, I’ll let you know who I think of, and we can perform additional trials as needed.”

“Am I _allergic_ to brevity?” you ask.

“Less banter, more praise.”

“Impress me first. The shirt will need to go. I want to touch you more.”

“For science?” she asks, wiggling free of her blouse in a very deliberate and achingly effective motion.

“For science.”

In the interest of scientific inquiry, you run a fingertip over the place where the cup of your bralette gives way to scalloped white lace, trace the contours of her breast, dip beneath the fabric to graze the sensitive flesh beneath. She whines as you drag your hand away, resting it over her sternum, pressed between your bodies.

You recognize the noise for what it is; a performance, though one rooted in truth.

“Use your words,” you whisper.

“Keep touching me,” she replies.

“Specificity would serve you well.”

“There is not a sexy word for ‘tit’. I humbly request that you return your ministrations to their previous physical location.”

You frown.

“You’re right, of course. Wordcraft is a valid concern in this context. There is such an unsexy arsenal of language for breasts.”

She giggles slightly - there is no way that you have ever made _that_ noise in your life - and says, with a delicate eyebrow raise, “rumblespheres.”

“Minx.”

“I’m too far gone to negotiate the vicissitudes of language! You’ll have to do the thinking for us, ideally once your mouth is on my _fucking_ boob.”

“This is agony. I thought we wanted praise? Is this another instance in which I must concede to surprising myself?”

“As always, we are full of su- mmfph!”

Cutting her off mid-sentence, you make use of the hand still anchored to her lower back and dip her, slightly, into your other arm. You can’t support your own weight with the sort of ease that Kanaya can, damn your sexy alien vampire wife, but you can execute a sort of controlled descent, bringing her gently to the soft carpeted floor, pinning her with your knees over her hips, and completing the gesture with a rough open-mouthed kiss.

“A much better use of your capacity for commentary would be informing me as to how well you are enjoying yourself,” you tell her.

“I - ah!”

She doesn’t get a particularly abundant opportunity to find words, because you reentangle one hand in her hair and pull her head back firmly, leaning down to suck at her pulse point, her blood pounding just beneath the skin stretched over her carotid.

As you do so, you reach back down to resume thumbing over her breast, tracing circles around her hardening nipple with your thumb through the material of her bralette.

“Yes,” she says, rolling her hips beneath your knees, eyes closed when you look up momentarily from her neck. “That’s perfect. Please.”

“‘Please’ is an excellent word,” you inform her, letting your breath warm her throat as you rearrange yourself to the other side and resume sucking gently at her neck, tightening your grip on her hair. “I think I’d like to hear it again.”

She obliges, and between shudders and pleading noises, you divest her of her bralette and her skirt.

It’s much easier, you find, on human skin, to strike the right balance between the pressure necessary to elicit noises in response and sufficient force to bruise. You’ve left a few tiny marks where you’ve moved down to her clavicle, purple bruise faded slightly into the shadow cast by the bone, but otherwise her neck is unmarked. Kanaya took quite some time to master this.

You’ve always been a quick learner.

“Don’t stop,” she complains, opening her eyes to frown up at you as you admire your handiwork.

“As you like it,” you tell her, running your fingers up one of her arms, across her chest, down the other, relaxing your grip on her hair only slightly, which similarly makes her whine in discontent. “Sh. Relax. Let me take a moment just to feel you.”

Once you’ve found your legs, after such a long time, you are quite good at this. You regret to note that it is much easier to inhabit this headspace when sober. You’ve made your choices, and you abide by their consequences, but you almost wish that you had invested more time in this side of things earlier. Kanaya treats you as though you are made of glass; compared to her, perhaps you are, but damn it, you know what you like!

You wonder if you’ll remember this the next time that you are in the position to have sex with your wife, and find that you hope that you do.

“Still,” you direct your double. “Be very still.”

Adjusting again, you slip the hand previously twined in her hair loosely around her neck, running a thumb over the bruises on her clavicle.

“Please,” she whispers again, pressing up to meet your grip as you lower your mouth to her breast.

“Sh,” you remind her, pushing her back down as you flicker your tongue over her nipple, applying no pressure to her trachea but tightening your grip just slightly against the sides of her neck, feeling for her pulse, noting as it quickens beneath you.

You kiss her, softly at first, then begin to suck bruises into her breast, still feather-light, but just hard enough to set purple marks blooming beneath your lips, your teeth. With your free hand, you reach down, from the small of her back to the swell of her - there truly are no perfectly eloquent words for ‘ass’, are there. Alas. English is a language of many deficits.

Straddling her like this, you are reminded acutely that you are, in fact, very turned on right now.

She seems to notice as well, canting her hips up to press against you through your skirt. You are still completely clothed. You contemplate, for a moment, the psychosexual significance of this positioning, then forget about doing that as she makes another soft, breathy noise and twists her shoulders beneath you.

“Please,” she says again. “This is torment. You are tormenting me.”

“I like myself like this,” you tell her.

“Whimpering like a needy bitch?” she suggests. “I can beg, you know. I will. Touch me.”

“I do know. And not yet. I simply enjoy the feeling that I might be able to control myself, for once. A bit too literal, perhaps, but that has always been the fleeting objective. Elusive. I may not always understand myself, but I can…”

You tighten your grip on her neck, just slightly, and lean in to kiss her again. She closes her eyes and breathes into it, a noise of pure bliss, too soft to be a product of artifice, almost quiet enough to miss entirely.

“Why _am_ I so goddamned loud?” you ask, running the tip of your tongue along the shell of her ear. “Aren’t I the very person to ask?”

She smiles up at you as you relax your grip, take a moment to collect yourself.

“You enjoy it,” she says simply, with a gesture approximating a shrug. “I would rather talk, but in lieu of words…”

It’s difficult to argue with yourself on this count. She makes a compelling case, you have to admit, and besides that, she proceeds to take advantage of the brief reprieve to guide your hands into hers and begin to direct them down to her thighs.

“Pleeeeaaaase,” she says, drawing it out into a full sentence, back to wiggling as enticingly as she can manage with your knees holding her in place.

“Again, you forget your place,” you tell her. “Short straw. Hands above your head.”

She laughs, but complies, allowing you to pin her wrists together, shuffling her hips eagerly and gazing up at you with your face in a hungry way that would be utterly uncanny if you weren’t _very_ into it.

“Good,” you whisper. “Very good. Still, now. This will be new for us both. I trust you to tell me what you like. Words are your friend. You’re clever, and I like to hear you speak. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she says, with a self-satisfied smile that you’re certain matches your own. “Ah, mistress? Ma’am?”

You wrinkle your nose.

“Horrible. Let’s go with ‘Rose’.”

“No fun allowed,” she says, pouting exaggeratedly.

“Really?” you say, reaching down to press her thighs apart. “Is it not _fun_, then, to know exactly who is doing this to you? To know who you are permitting to touch you like this? I know what you want, Rose. It’s not some faceless domme in a blonde wig, and it’s not simply to be made to writhe about wantonly on the carpet, though you’re doing quite a good job of that. We want to be understood. We want to be figured out. To be heard, acknowledged, known on some impossible level. And we want to understand, too. It’s why this works. We are a complete entity. We desire to be our true self, to know her, to be known by her. Biblically as much as in any other respect.”

As you speak, you let your hand move slowly up her thigh, tracing meaningless patterns into her skin as she twists and tenses and gasps.

“Do you think she’s watching?” you whisper, as you finally reach the lace trim of her underwear and she _squeaks_ as you run your fingers over the delicate flesh of her inner thigh, just inches from where she clearly wants you. “Our alpha self. I think she is. And I imagine that she’s proud of you. That you look as beautiful to her as you do to me, in a state of surrender. We’re the best of her. And you - you’re so lovely like this. Irresistible. Strong enough to hold yourself together and strong enough to fall apart. And then to do it all over again.”

You drag your fingertip between her legs, skating over the dampened fabric of her undergarments, which are embroidered with a pattern of tiny purple squiddles; not quite matching the long-discarded bralette, but not deliberately unmatched, either.

She moans softly, her arms jerking almost out of your grip, hips pushing up against your hand. You hold her there, though, and while she’s as physically capable as you are, she allows it, even as you shift to a pattern of gentle circles, press your own hips against the back of your hand in time with each stroke of your fingers. 

After so long entirely without touching yourself, you’re far too into it far too quickly, pushing your weight against her, crooking your fingers to press more firmly against the both of you in tandem as your heartrate climbs and your breathing turns ragged.

“Stay as you are,” you tell her, releasing her hands over her head.

True to your command, she leaves them where they lay as you reach down to press her hip into the carpet, to angle her more effectively, your skirt pushed up around your waist, now, neither of you even fully unclothed. But you know yourself, you know exactly how much pressure you can take, how quickly you can come, how badly you must want to.

For all that the two of you have departed as entities since the fork, you’re on precisely the same wavelength now.

“Rose,” she says, her voice heavy with tension. “Rose, Rose, please, yes…”

“I’m here,” you tell her, pushing back as her thighs clench, feeling your own do the same. “It’s… ah, frightfully narcissistic, but I want to see you come. Let go. Let me see.”

Her noises, now, have turned less theatric, more breathy, as the performance is stripped away. When she cries out, it isn’t a scream, but a hitch in her breathing that takes on a volume of its own as she stiffens and shudders. For a second, you meet her eyes.

She smiles as they flutter closed, then moans again.

The sound winds heavily around the tension in your own stomach, an electricity that lances through your chest, down every appendage, her body still pressed against yours, your hand against her and against you simultaneously. She finishes as you start, leaning in and pressing your mouth to her neck to quiet yourself, biting down harder than you intended to, sinking your fingertips into the handhold of her hip.

You look utterly silly, clothes askew, your mostly naked clone smiling up from beneath you as you force your breathing to even out.

She tilts her head up, delivering an asynchronously chaste kiss to the underside of your jaw.

“I don’t think it’s narcissistic at all,” she murmurs.

“You wouldn’t,” you reply, a bit flippantly, rolling onto your back and allowing yourself to relax for a moment.

“What’s the synthesis, then, Dr. Lalonde?” she presses, resting her head on your shoulder. Easy to lean in and kiss her on the forehead in the way you know you like.

“Ah. Yes. The immortal science of Marxist-dialectics-selfcest,” you reply. “The problem, here, is that properly vetted experiments are typically performed in triplicates, at a minimum.”

“Triplicates, you say?”

“I _do_ say.”

“So I may yet get you out of these clothes,” she suggests, sitting up slightly and toying with your collar.

“You may yet.”

She looks down at the careful marks you left snaking across her breasts, tiny purple sunbursts in coiled chains extending from her neck to the base of her ribcage.

“We’re no longer perfectly identical,” you observe.

“Certainly not,” she says, leaning in close enough to feel her breath against your ear. “I don’t intend to tease you, you know. Call it post-orgasm benevolence. I won’t make an art project of you, Rose. I’m going to fuck you hard and fast. None of our delicate monologuing-interspersed bullshit. I want to know what it sounds like when I _scream_. Are you prepared for that?”

You must admit, you are.

For science.


	2. The Hegelian Dialectic

“Holy fucking _shit_,” you mutter, opening your eyes.

Dirk has moved on to a second joint, and is watching you impassively as you blink and reacclimatize to your presence in your own physical body rather than your metaphysical extensions-of-self.

“That took a while,” he observes.

“How long did you -?”

“Same as always. Mine take about fifteen minutes maximum to kill each other once they realize they’re fake. Got close to ten this time. At some point it’s all a numbers game.”

“Ah. Of course.”

He offers you the joint, and you accept it gratefully.

“I can hear you kinkshaming me with that ‘ah’.”

“It’s safe to assume that any and all of my utterances, when directed towards you, are either explicitly or implicitly kinkshaming.”

“Glass houses, Rose. Conservatively you’re at least 50% me, though you somehow managed to skip out on the best part.”

“Right, the foundational aspect of Dirk Strider that gets off on clone murder. A grievous ectobiological deficit on my part. I mourn what might have been. Do call in for a tailor to construct a mantilla of black lace to adorn my brow, that all may know how intimately I feel the sense of loss.”

“Don’t get fresh with me, young lady. This is serious business. Fate-of-the-metanarrative business. Do you feel any different?”

“To be frank, I feel like I need a stiff drink and a cigar.”

“But it did work, for you,” he exhales slowly, almost in relief. “You can do it too.”

“Yes, I can conceive of a narrative in which I take the admittedly stellar advice to ‘go fuck yourself’ quite literally, liberally, and athletically,” you laugh, passing him the joint. “Is it such a surprise, having met me, knowing who I chose to marry? We don’t all deliberately seek out people as wholly unlike ourselves as possible for these matters.”

“I’ll give you that one, because you’re not wrong.”

“I am very seldom wrong. It’s basically my whole deal. Besides, it’s part of receiving my ‘verse’ license. Before one can adopt the apellation, one must first elucidate on one’s willingness to fuck one’s own clone before a committee. Should an applicant hesitate, they are relegated to the comparatively dull fate of a top or bottom. Tragic, really.”

“Bullshit. I’m verse as hell. I could top anyone if I wanted to.”

“Try that sentence out again in an hour. I’m not currently high enough to buy it.”

“You can do it too,” he repeats, pointedly ignoring your objection. “Where do they go, for you? I’m just wondering, you know, because mine… they die, but I don’t know what happens to them. As narrative entities, I mean. I haven’t figured it out. And I wonder, I guess.”

The joint continues to burn in his hand. You don’t mention it; contrary to your assertions, you are definitely the correct amount of high for this conversation and don’t need another turn even slightly.

“They _are_ me,” you say. “Is that not how it feels for you? It’s as though we’ve reunited. I’ve examined two divergent faces of myself, and now I’m welcoming them home. There are aspects of me that are silent when not actively in conversation with themselves. Threads of identity that I’ve forgotten or suppressed in some way. Always present, but rarely examined.”

“Well, that’s a lot to fucking deal with.”

“It is. For all that I regularly subconsciously consider my abstinence from alcohol, for instance, in decision-making, I am rarely so inclined to consider exactly why I prefer myself outside of that particular influence. Was I an alcoholic? I don’t believe I was, not in this… version of events, but I so easily could have been. I think that I was, on a different path, so close to this one that they are near-impossible to discern at points. The veil is thin. Peculiarly, this becomes clearer when I… splinter, is that what you called it? I can see it. See, capital S, even. The inquiry into that matter has a sort of antiseptic burn.”

He frowns. You’ve been worried about him for a while, now. Nothing he’s said has done much to assuage your concerns, but there is little that you can do for someone who deeply does not want to be helped. You can try, though. You can be present for him. This seems to be all that he is willing to ask of you.

“I don’t think you were,” he says. “But I wouldn’t know, would I. I wasn’t there.”

“Occupied with other things, as I recall. Believe it or not, your nonpresence on the meteor has no effect on the esteem in which I hold you.”

“Generous,” he snorts. “I spend too much time fucking with myself, and sometimes I wish that was more of a literal than figurative verb, at least in these contexts. I’m different every time. It’s fucking terrifying, actually. Some shit is pretty consistent. We kill each other. But the rest is always different. Like there’s no fundamental me to interrogate. I’m always staring down the shittiest imaginable version. Who’d fuck that guy?”

The joint burns all the way to his fingertips and begins to singe his flesh. He looks down at it in surprise and drops the smoking roll of paper.

“I think I met Dave’s bro this time,” he tells you, too offhandedly not to be deliberate.

“_Oh_,” you say, leaning in slightly.

“That’s a little fucked, isn’t it? He hated himself just as much as I do, somehow. Almost exactly the same amount. I mean, zero to murder in ten minutes. Doesn’t really make sense. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I’m going to get myself a drink, if that’s cool with you. Want a coke or something?”

You shake your head, frowning to yourself as he lopes out to procure libations.

The moment of contentment is mostly passed. You’ve resolved something about yourself, you think, or at least illuminated some underlying aspects-of-internally-asynchronous-identity in need of further analysis. This is a different kind of challenge. While you had been considering heading out to discuss the experience with Kanaya, you hold off on the idea.

Does he have anyone else to talk to about this sort of thing? You have never been accused of being a comforting presence, but you don’t want to leave him here alone.

“Actually, a glass of water sounds excellent,” you call after him. “And I might phone in for a pizza. I’ll stay over. It’s getting late.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, returning with water in one hand and a half-empty bottle of bourbon in the other.

You don’t think you’ve ever seen him drink straight liquor before, but he flicks the cap off easily and takes a long swig.

“So,” you prompt. “Enlighten me. How exactly do our… artificial subnarratives, if you will, have anything to do with our canon existence?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says drily.

“Try me,” you say.

He does.

And you do. Believe him, that is.

Unfortunately for almost everybody, you believe him. Too late to stop any of the events in progress. Too late to stop him, or you. The urge to understand one’s self is a powerful thing.

…

“How long?” you ask him.

“Seconds,” he says matter-of-factly. “Though they’re all fuckin’ omniscient now. They don’t even talk anymore. Straight to the point.”

You nod, trying to be economical with your words. The voice of the robotic self in which you have lately come to reside is still jarring. It is somewhat cramping your style when it comes to monologuing, not to mention the consumption of illicit substances.

He doesn’t bother offering you the joint this time. You would have little use for it.

“Anything new on your front?” he sighs, staring out the porthole into the vastness of paradox space.

“Yes,” you say.

Obligingly, he waits for you to muster up the words. You do appreciate it, how he seems reluctant to dig his metanarrative grip too deeply into your mind. How he is somewhat apologetic, at least - more than he seems to be about almost anything else - for just how much time he has spent manipulating you with invisible strings. You are aware that you are making excuses for him, twisting yourself into knots to justify something that ought to be unjustifiable. That you know perfectly well cannot be justified.

You want to ask ‘how long’, but you don’t.

It is more exculpatory, you think, if the force behind your decision-making is Schrodinger’s Agency. If you are eternally suspended between responsibility and blamelessness. If the strings stay invisible, if they are truly there at all.

(The stakes would be still lower if you had a drink in your hand. Or they would feel that way until you no longer did. But nothing _feels_ in this body. That’s why he gave it to you. Some relief from omnipresent feeling. From everything you have ever felt, ever, constantly. From what was tearing you apart, as you have torn yourself apart in so many narratives.)

You have your motivations for believing this.

The days are long in paradox space, and you no longer sleep in this body. Some contemplations are unfathomable.

“We - they talked, as is typical,” you say.

Three hours in, for the first time, you killed yourself.

He must hear you, because he nods knowingly, takes another hit, and reaches over to offer you a semi-comforting pat to the shoulder. Chassis. Whatever the fuck you are. Whatever the fuck kind of Rose… does this. A self that you do not recognize.

A self that you are destroying in the service of something greater.

“For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you,” he says.

“You would be,” you say, and he cracks a barely-there smile. “I… am grateful, to you, for doing what needs to be done. Perhaps even more so as I begin to understand the cost.”

And it _is_ a heavy cost. To both of you. Too heavy to unshoulder and examine just yet. You wonder whether, upon doing so, you will be able to pick it up again. For now, you try to trust him, and you try to trust yourself, and you wait.

“Aw. Very Hallmark.”

“Exceptionally un-Hallmark, dad.”

“Let me be real with you for a second. If I was rubber-stamping shitty movies about the true meaning of Christmas and found family bullshit and all that noise, I think I’d try to slip in some clonefucking-slash-clonemurder drama under the radar while I had everyone distracted with the vapid dialogue and appalling wardrobe choices.”

“Is that a ‘no’, then, on my ‘matching sweaters’ initiative?”

“Hell no. This ship is fucking freezing. Make me a sweater.”

“To hear is to obey.”

“Don’t make this weirder than it has to be.”

“And to think, here I was, believing erroneously that ‘make things weirder than they have to be’ was our family motto. Fine. I’ll leave you to your brooding, then. No doubt on matters of great importance.”

“Sit with me?” he says, staring out into the vastness of paradox space, to the place, barely more than a glimmer of light on the horizon, where Earth-C is fast disappearing behind you. “Just for a little while.”

“I sincerely have nothing better to do,” you tell him flatly.

It’s difficult to speak with any other intonation. You’ll need a few hours alone sooner or later to experiment with the parameters of this non-body embodiment. At least the physical challenge will be something to negotiate other than the rest of what you are currently neglecting.

For now, though, with ostensibly months ahead of you (time isn’t real, but it feels oppressively so, facing down so much of it) you seat yourself beside your father and watch your world vanish into nothing.

He doesn’t smile, but he does relax incrementally in his seat.

“I’m sorry about your clones,” he says. “It’s possible that I’m not the best influence in that regard.”

You shrug. It’s an odd gesture from within the haphazardly articulated body. You find little fault with the system’s cognitive function, but he’s built you squarely into uncanny valley in terms of actual motions.

“The credit for that development belongs to me, not to you. We can only be who and what we are. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You’re right. Still fuckin’ blows, though.”

“Yes. It does blow.”

It really, truly does.

**Author's Note:**

> Let’s play a game called ‘writing porn so entirely within my comfort zone that it’s literally hilarious’.


End file.
